Monday night I attended Human Factors International’s dinner and presentation on advanced eye tracking tools. The event took place at the fabulous offices of IMC2.
Let me start this off by saying that IMC2 is a company I’ve followed for the past few years, and I’ve always wanted to get in the doors to see what this funky, bring your dog to work, laid-back atmosphere was really like. More about that later, but first lets get to the stuff that is actually important.
HFI’s Presentation
The presentation was basically just a look at the software and what it can do. I was hoping to get some info I could apply to my sites, but I guess that would be hoping for too much.
The equipment and software is pretty amazing though. HFI uses the Tobii for their eye tracking studies, and it does do some pretty amazing things.
The way Tobii works is it uses 2 cameras to track a spot just above the pupil of your eye. After a short 
calibration of the machine, you’re good to go. The visual representation of the tracking looks like red dots with scribbles in between. While this is going on on the front end, the software on the back end is busy throwing coordinates into a database. These coordinates are what allows usability folks to create heat maps, graphs, and other statistical representations of the user’s experience.
Back to the Fun
So, back to the amazing offices of IMC2. Part way through the HFI presentation we had to sneak out to find the restrooms (free beer and sitting for a long time do not mix) and ended up on a tour of the offices with one of their usability guys. They actually have two offices in Dallas, so I can only vouch for the coolness of the one I visited. This place was amazing! They have little balconies all around the building, one is a big one that they call the backyard. They have a Guitar Hero room, a zen room, a conference room with the furniture hanging upside down from the ceiling, and awesome break-out rooms for teams to hang out and be creative. I wish I had taken my camera phone with me to snag some pictures, cause it was super cool.
I also visited the HFI event, and I found the networking crowd to be just as hip as the IMC2 offices. The group was a nice mixture of Society for Technical Communication (STC), Refresh Dallas, and DFW Usability Professionals Association (DFW-UPA) members. I think the advertisement for free barbeque didn’t hurt the atmosphere much either
All in all this was a fun event, but like Heather noted, there was a bit too much tool description, and too little practical use scenarios. I was really hoping to take the information from previous usability studies home to apply it to my designs. Oh well, maybe next time!